יום שישי, 6 בינואר 2012

Sleeping with the Enemy

The public in Israel and in most of the Western world expects the future peace relations between Israel and Palestine to conform to their idea of friendly neighbors. Perhaps not as of France and Switzerland, but certainly not worse than tha of, say, Venezuela and Columbia. The attempts to achieve such arrangement, commendable as they are, are of little use, or even damaging, unless they match the reality on the ground.

The Palestinians consider the state of Israel a mistake of history established at their expense. This is not a belief of just the "bad" leaders; the majority of the public maintains the same view. The differences of opinion among the Palestinians are about the effective means for achieving the common goal, but there is almost unanimous agreement about the goal itself. In fact, if a Palestinian leader had seriously considered the Western notion of peace with Israel and expressed it, he or she would have been eliminated. Even President Mubarak, friendly as he was toward Israel, did not dare to "normalize" the relations with it.

Peace or peace process as perceived by the Palestinians is measured by its contribution to their final objective of destroying the Jewish state. Each concession of Israel, a confidence building step, as the West likes to call it, is considered a weakeness that calls for more demands. Thus retreat from Lebanon and Gaza, in contradiction to logical expectations, caused fierce military encounters. So did the second Intifada followed the Oslo agreements. Even the same words used by the parties have different meanings. For Israelis peace means the end of the conflict, for Arabs it is a sort of armistice, another tool in achieving the elemination of the Jewish state.

Israel public is naively angry at the meetings of Mahmous Abbas with terrorists, with commemorating terrorists by naming squares in their name, by antisemitsm in Palestinians textbooks, by Palestinians maps which fail to show Israel and many other such expressions. Mahmooud Abbas, however, notwithstanding his double English talk about peace, to remain politically viable leader must first of all bow to his public.

The fact that peace as understood by Israel and the West is at present an impossible dream does not preclude contacts and talks with the other side. If It is userful, there is nothing wrong in sleeping with the enemy. Oslo agreements faciliated keeping Israel secure and made the Palestinians a card carrying member of the international community. Only history will determine who gained and who lost. Recognizing the state of affairs as it really is, obstructs and hinders nothing; On the contrary, it provides flexibility and opens new avenues for exploring security and relatively peaceful existence. Wishful thinking is never a solid practical guide.

The rhetoric of Hamas is different from that of PLO, in a way it is more honest, but the content of the charters, texts and statetments is similar. Since Hamas uses terror to achieve its objectives, Israel and the West do not maintain direct contacts with it. Israel does however negotiate with Hamas through third parties. It has done so through Egypt in order to limit the scope of clashes; it used every channel possible to get Gilad Shalit released. It is hard to see why indirect contacts are morally or politically superior to direct contacts. Direct contacts could grant Hamas a sort of "legitimacy" and open the way for such contacts with other countries. At least initially, however, they they can be conducted secrestely. It was wrong not to negotiate with Hamas during the last war three years ago on military intelligence level. In such talks Israel would have gained much more than by agreement faciliated by Egypt, Russia and the UN. The public relations war after the war, would have been less damaging too. Talking to Hamas will not change their objectives and convert them into ardent Zionists, but it will have immediate pragmatic advantages. Each side will have a better understanding of the other and thus there will be a better chance to avoid unintentional conflicts. It would enable negotiating perhaps better living conditions to Gaza Palestinians, for instance by allowing better trade to and from Gaza through the port of Ashdod.

Whether Israel likes it or not, Hamas is a political power among Palestinians. PLO and Hamas attempt to reconciliate, namely to agree on some kind of power sharing process. Staying aside and speaking only to PLO does not help.

The effort to "educate" the Palestinians and teach them how a good neighbour should behave is both futile and tactically wrong. It is up for the Palestinians themselves to decide if they are antisemites or not, if they want to destroy the Jewish state or not, to teach their children that Hitler was right or not. They should do it according to their own interest without constant preaching and anger by Israel. If in practice Palestinian leader Mr. A is saying that Jerusalem must be judenrein, Israel is annoyed, so is the US. Then the Palestinian response is, well, perhaps Jerusalem does not have to be judenrein. Everybody is a kind of happy and Palestinian ask for a counter confidence building step.

Since end of conflict is impossible the parties shoud, if they desire so, to look for a short or medium term arrangement. Such arrangement will take into consideration the perception of behaviour of the other. The Arabs might decide that to gain favor with the Israeli public, perhaps their anti-Jewish rhetoric should change, or that hatred is almost as sweet as revenge, and accept the consequences of either choice.

In principle there is no distinction between PLO and Hamas. If Israel is sleeping with the enemy, the color of cloths does not make much difference.